Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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Person Name

School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#5101

Robert Fernholz

#81152

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Robert Fernholz is a mathematician and financial researcher specializing in mathematics of finance. He founded INTECH, an institutional equity management firm, in 1987 where he was its chief investment officer. He is also the President of Allocation Strategies, LLC, a company that he founded in 2012.

#5102

Vijayan Nair

#57312

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Vijayan N. Nair is currently Head of the Statistical Learning and Advanced Computing Group in Corporate Model Risk at Wells Fargo. He was Donald A. Darling Collegiate Professor of Statistics and Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 1993 to 2017. He served as Chair of the Statistics Department at Michigan from 1998 to 2010 . Vijay was instrumental in launching the Michigan Institute for Data Science and was recognized as a Distinguished Scientist by MIDAS. Prior to joining Michigan, he spent 15 years as a research scientist in the Ma...

#5103

Richard H. Guy

#104231

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

#5104

Aline Huke Frink

#85256

Overall Influence

1904 - 2000 (96 years)

Aline Huke Frink was an American mathematician, and a professor on the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University from 1930 to 1969. Early life and education Aline Huke was born in Torrington, Connecticut and raised in Massachusetts, the daughter of Allen Johnson Huke and Mary Evelyn Feustel Huke. Her father was a businessman, and her mother was a schoolteacher.

#5105

Frances Ellen Baker

#88617

Overall Influence

1902 - 1995 (93 years)

Frances Ellen Baker was an American mathematician who became a professor of mathematics and chair of the mathematics department at Vassar College. Early life and education Baker's father was Richard Philip Baker, a British-born mathematician, mathematical model maker, and college administrator. Her mother, Katherine Riedelbauch Baker, was a music teacher and chamber musician. Baker was born on December 19, 1902, in Anna, Illinois, and was home-schooled until high school, where she attended a public school in Iowa City, Iowa. She became valedictorian of her school, graduating in 1919.

#5106

Élisabeth Bouscaren

Élisabeth Bouscaren

#82258

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Élisabeth Bouscaren is a French mathematician who works on algebraic geometry, algebra and mathematical logic . Education and career Bouscaren received her doctorate in 1979 from the University of Paris VII and her habilitation in 1985. From 1981 she worked at the French National Center for Scientific Research until 2005, when she moved to the University of Paris XI. Since 2007, she has held the position of Research Director at CNRS.

#5107

Thomas Ransford

#103747

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Thomas Ransford is a British-born Canadian mathematician, known for his research in spectral theory and complex analysis. He holds a Canada Research Chair in mathematics at Université Laval. Ransford earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1984.

#5108

Philip M. Whitman

#68905

Overall Influence

Philip Martin Whitman is an American mathematician who contributed to lattice theory, particularly the theory of free lattices. Living in Pittsburgh, he attended the Haverford College, where he earned a corporation scholarship for 1936–37, and a Clementine Cope fellowship for 1937–38, and was awarded highest honors in mathematical astronomy in 1937. He was elected to the college's chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In June 1937, he was conferred the Bachelor of science degree from Haverford. According to Garrett Birkhoff, Whitman was an undergraduate Harvard student in 1937, and an outstan...

#5109

Nilanjan Chatterjee

#45525

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Nilanjan Chatterjee is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics and Genetic Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in the Department of Biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and in the Department of Oncology in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was formerly the chief of the Biostatistics Branch of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics.

#5110

Kaushal Kumar Verma

#81080

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Kaushal Kumar Verma is an Indian mathematician who specializes in complex analysis. He earned a B.Tech degree in engineering physics from IIT Bombay in 1992. He then obtained a PhD in mathematics from Indiana University Bloomington, and also worked at Syracuse University for an year, followed by working at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for 3 years. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2014. He is a mathematics professor and dean of mathematical and physical sciences at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

#5111

Jacqueline Naze Tjøtta

Jacqueline Naze Tjøtta

#81178

Overall Influence

1935 - 2017 (82 years)

Jacqueline Andrée Naze Tjøtta was a Norwegian mathematician who became the first female mathematical sciences professor in Norway. Jacqueline Naze was born in Montpellier, France, to musician Maurize André Naze and Renée Marie Courbet. She graduated in mathematics from the Aix-Marseille University and Sorbonne, Paris. She married Norwegian mathematician Sigve Tjøtta in 1964. She was appointed professor in applied mathematics at the University of Bergen from 1966. Her research interests focused on kinetic theory, magnetohydrodynamics and theoretical acoustics.

#5112

Nigel Smart

#39955

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Nigel Smart is a professor at COSIC at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Chief Academic Officer at Zama. He is a cryptographer with interests in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice.

#5113

Carl Jockusch

#48922

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Carl Groos Jockusch Jr. is an American mathematician. He graduated from Alamo Heights High School in 1959, attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and transferred to Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania in 1960, where he received his B.A. in 1963 with Highest Honors. He then enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. In 2014, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

#5114

Dan Margalit

#103219

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Dan Margalit is an American mathematician at Vanderbilt University. His research fields include geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology, with a particular focus on mapping class groups of surfaces.

#5115

Georges Gonthier

#70001

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Georges Gonthier is a Canadian computer scientist and one of the leading practitioners in formal mathematics. He led the formalization of the four color theorem and Feit–Thompson proof of the odd-order theorem.

#5116

André P. C. Faaij

#104519

Overall Influence

#5117

Wolfgang Viechtbauer

#97544

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (124 years)

Wolfgang Viechtbauer is a statistician. He is an associate professor of methodology and statistics at the Maastricht University in the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences and Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience. His most influential work has been focused on the field of meta-analysis and evidence synthesis.

#5118

Linda Zhao

#83544

Overall Influence

Linda Hong Zhao is a Chinese-American statistician. She is a Professor of Statistics and at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Zhao specializes in modern machine learning methods.

#5119

Russell Lyons

#89696

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Russell David Lyons is an American mathematician, specializing in probability theory on graphs, combinatorics, statistical mechanics, ergodic theory and harmonic analysis. Lyons graduated with B.A. mathematics in 1979 from Case Western Reserve University, where he became a Putnam Fellow in 1977 and 1978. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of Michigan with the thesis A Characterization of Measures Whose Fourier-Stieltjes Transforms Vanish at Infinity, which was supervised by Hugh L. Montgomery and Allen Shields. Lyons was a postdoc for the academic year 1984–1985 at the University of Paris-Sud.

#5120

Reinhardt Kiehl

#89571

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Reinhardt Kiehl is a German mathematician. From 1955, Kiehl studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at the University of Göttingen and the University of Heidelberg. He received in 1965 his Ph.D. under Friedrich Karl Schmidt at Heidelberg University with thesis Äquivalenzrelationen in analytischen Räumen. He was from 1966 to 1968 a research assistant and in 1968–1969 a docent at the University of Münster, where he received in 1968 his habilitation. From 1969 to 1972 he was a professor ordinarius at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. From 1972 he was a professor ordinarius at the Uni...

#5121

Clement W. H. Lam

#104170

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Clement Wing Hong Lam is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in combinatorics. He is famous for the computer proof, with Larry Thiel and S. Swiercz, of the nonexistence of a finite projective plane of order 10.

#5122

Norman Fenton

#48460

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Norman E. Fenton is a British mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Professor of Risk Information Management in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. He is known for his work in software metrics and is the author of the textbook Software Metrics: A Rigorous Approach, as of 2014 in its third edition.

#5123

Alena Šolcová

#52540

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Alena Šolcová is a Czech mathematician and science historian. She is the founder of the Kepler Museum, an astronomy museum in Prague. Life and work Between 1968 and 1973, Šolcová studied mathematics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and Philosophy at Charles University. Between 2002 and 2005, she completed her doctoral studies in mathematics in Civil Engineering with the doctoral thesis titled Fermat's Ideas Revived in Mathematics Applied in Engineering, and in 2009 she completed her habilitation at the Czech Technical University in Prague, and was appointed associate professor in the...

#5124

Haya Kaspi

#71912

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Haya Kaspi is an Israeli operations researcher, statistician, and probability theorist. She is a professor emeritus of industrial engineering and management at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

#5125

Taekyung Kim

#104624

Overall Influence

#5126

Brian White

#73587

Overall Influence

Brian Cabell White is an American mathematician who specializes in differential geometry and geometric measure theory. He is a professor of mathematics and former chair of the mathematics department at Stanford University. He played a key role in the solution of the double bubble conjecture, that the minimum-area enclosure of two volumes is formed from three spherical patches meeting in a circle and forming dihedral angles of 2/3 with each other, by proving that the optimal solution to this problem is necessarily a surface of revolution.

#5127

Anita Schöbel

#83637

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Anita Schöbel is a German mathematician and operations researcher known for her work in facility location and mathematical optimization of timetables for public transportation. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Kaiserslautern, where she is head of the optimization group and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics. She is also the president of the German Operations Research Society.

#5128

Angelika Bunse-Gerstner

#95450

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Angelika Bunse-Gerstner is a German mathematician specializing in numerical linear algebra and control theory. Education and career Bunse-Gerstner earned her Ph.D. from Bielefeld University in 1978. Her dissertation, Der HR-Algorithmus zur numerischen Bestimmung der Eigenwerte einer Matrix, was jointly supervised by Ludwig Elsner and Hans Johnen.

#5129

Kenneth W. Thompson

#18696

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Kenneth W. Thompson was an American academic and author known for his contributions to normative theory in international relations. In 1978 he became director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He retired as director in 1998, but continued to head its Forum Program until 2004.

#5130

Frank Leymann

#76710

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Frank Leymann is a German computer scientist and mathematician. He is professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and director and founder of the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems .

#5131

Juliet Popper Shaffer

#63775

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Juliet Popper Shaffer is an American psychologist, statistician and statistics educator known for her research on multiple hypothesis testing. She is a teaching professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.

#5132

Sheila Tinney

#66795

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Sheila Christina Tinney was an Irish mathematical physicist. Her 1941 PhD from the University of Edinburgh, completed under the supervision of Max Born in just two years, is believed to make her the first Irish-born and -raised woman to receive a doctorate in the mathematical sciences.

#5133

Peter Onumanyi

#85480

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Peter Onumanyi is a Nigerian mathematician. He was born in 1951 in Okene, Nigeria. A graduate of the University of Ibadan and Imperial College, London, he is a fellow and past president of the Mathematical Association of Nigeria. He has been the Head of the Mathematics department, Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, and Deputy Vice-chancellor of the University of Jos.

#5134

Thomas J. Laffey

#95676

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Thomas J. Laffey is an Irish mathematician known for his contributions to group theory and matrix theory. His entire career has been spent at University College Dublin , where he served two terms as head of the school of mathematics. While he formally retired in 2009, he remains active in research and publishing. The journal Linear Algebra and Its Applications had a special issue to mark his 65th birthday. He received the Hans Schneider Prize in 2013. In May 2019 at UCD, the International Conference on Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory held a celebration to honor Professor Laffey on his 7...

#5135

Roswitha Blind

#82609

Overall Influence

Roswitha Blind is a German mathematician, specializing in convex geometry, discrete geometry, and polyhedral combinatorics, and a politician and organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Germany in Stuttgart.

#5136

Alexander F. Roche

#104858

Overall Influence

#5137

Paul Christiaan Struik

#104862

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

#5138

R. Michael Canjar

#62534

Overall Influence

1953 - 2012 (59 years)

Robert Michael "Mike" Canjar was a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Detroit Mercy . He started there in 1995, and served as department Chairman from 1995–2002. He was promoted to Full Professor in 2001. He previously taught at several universities, including the University of Baltimore. He lived in Livonia, part of metropolitan Detroit, Michigan.

#5139

Harry V. Roberts

#40137

Overall Influence

1923 - 2004 (81 years)

Harry V. Roberts , American statistician, was a distinguished teacher and a pioneer in looking at the applications of Bayesian statistics to business decision making and in Total Quality Management. Roberts began teaching at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1949 as an instructor of statistics. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1951. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1955, and was appointed associate professor. He was made full professor in 1959, and was named Sigmund E. Edelstone Professor of Statistics and Quality Management in 1991. In 1997...

#5140

Frank Calegari

#102631

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Francesco Damien "Frank" Calegari is a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago working in number theory and the Langlands program. Career Calegari won a bronze medal and a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad while representing Australia in 1992 and 1993 respectively. Calegari received his PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 under the supervision of Ken Ribet.

#5141

Margaret Rayner

#82877

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Margaret Eva Rayner was a British mathematician who became vice principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford and president of the Mathematical Association. She was known for her research on isoperimetric inequalities, her work in mathematics education, and her publications on the history of mathematics and of St Hilda's College.

#5142

Odile Macchi

#61171

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Odile Macchi is a French physicist and mathematician. She has been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2004. Life Odile Danjou was born in Aurillac during the German occupation. She is one of the six recorded children of Bernard Danjou and his wife, born Geneviève Féat.

#5143

Colin J. Bushnell

#86319

Overall Influence

1947 - 2021 (74 years)

Colin John Bushnell was a British mathematician specialising in number theory and representation theory. He spent most of his career at King's College London, including a stint as the head of the School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, and made several contributions to the representation theory of reductive p-adic groupss and the local Langlands correspondence.

#5144

Julian Keilson

#88581

Overall Influence

1924 - 1999 (75 years)

Julian Keilson was an American mathematician. He was known for his work in probability theory. His work in survival analysis is relevant to many fields, e.g., medical research, parts supply, asset depreciation, rental pricing, etc.

#5145

John Neter

#84179

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (102 years)

John Neter was a German-born American statistician, university professor, and widely published author. Growing up in Germany, he was a classmate of Henry Kissinger. He spent much of his career teaching statistics at University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

#5146

Yuliya Mishura

#93974

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Yuliya Stepanivna Mishura is a Ukrainian mathematician specializing in probability theory and mathematical finance. She is a professor at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Education and career Mishura earned a Ph.D. in 1978 from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv with a dissertation on Limit Theorems for Functionals from Stochastic Fields supervised by Dmitrii Sergeevich Silvestrov. She earned a Dr. Sci. from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1990 with a dissertation Martingale Methods in the Theory of Stochastic Fields.

#5147

Philip Rabinowitz

#71455

Overall Influence

1926 - 2006 (80 years)

Philip Rabinowitz was an American and Israeli applied mathematician. He was best known for his work in numerical analysis, including his books A First Course in Numerical Analysis with Anthony Ralston and Methods of Numerical Integration with Philip J. Davis. He was the author of numerous articles on numerical computation.

#5148

George A. Diamond

#105085

Overall Influence

#5149

Deborah Ashby

#62338

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Deborah Ashby is a British statistician and academic who specialises in medical statistics and Bayesian statistics. She is the Director of the School of Public Health and Chair in Medical Statistics and Clinical Trials at Imperial College London. She was previously a lecturer then a reader at the University of Liverpool and a professor at Queen Mary University of London.

#5150

Matt Keeling

#105111

Overall Influence

Matthew James Keeling is a professor in the Mathematics Institute and the School of Life Sciences of the University of Warwick. He has been editor of the journal Epidemics since 2007. Keeling was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to SAGE during the Covid-19 response.

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